Toronto - I honestly can’t remember the last time I was happy about writing review on a movie. If you believe the imdb review, forget about it for a moment. TBS is probably more movie than you bargain for if you want to watch a crime film. I’m still wondering if it really wasn’t a Fight Club style mind bender.

The film has a simple enough premise - convicted killer Johan escapes from a correctional facility. He goes on a rampage trying to find his mother, who abandoned him in the Dutch justice system to rot. In the process, he picks up a 13 years-old girl as hostage in order to make his work easier. Tessa develops Stockholm syndrome, and not without the help from Johan’s lack of common sense as a hostage taker. Although the storyline sounds laughably straight-forward, the thing that made this film great was the shifting of assumed guilt. At the beginning you think Johan was the victim because he was punished by his unloving, uncooperative mother. You see the brutality of his escape but you feel that he has some humanity left in him and did not harm the therapy worker. And then you felt that he was guilty of taking Tessa hostage. But then his gentleness towards Tessa really seemed to show that he is just a good man who fell through the cracks and was doing everything he can to get back on track. And then it hits home in the end - you have no idea whatsoever who this guy really is - you’re just as gullible as Tessa. Reviewing the limited history presented by the film, you begin to see that it’s very possible that he orchestrated the whole thing methodically. So Johan had been lying from the start: he did rape and kill the therapist, killed his father, mother, and grandmother, raped his sister and other girls, and did everything during the hostage situation in order to have Tessa fall into his mouse trap. Oh, and what about that gun? He killed his accomplice - after bear-hugging him, too! That box of earrings really make you think - do we have a serial killer, or was this the result of him never given a fair chance? Well, the end wraps around to the beginning and so maybe this had happened before… or was it all because he was given no recourse? But then maybe this was a simple film afterall and I’m just over-reacting?

The screenplay itself is easy enough to act out. Lisa Smit did her part as the 13 years-old, but I think Theo Maassen did a better job as the soft-spoken ruthless terminator (apparently he’s a comedian… makes your blood run cold). At one point I thought I caught Tessa disappear from the Belgian police van, and I thought we had a Schizophrenic guy who made up everything - but then it would be pretty hard to convince the police that he’s holding his imaginary personality hostage. Even though discovering I’m watching a perfectly executed brainwashing/homocide is a bit unsettling, watch it, and you might get some goose bumps, too.